2013. We traveled to Cuba with a Friendly Planet tour of about a dozen Americans flying from Miami to the Jose Marti Airport outside Havana. Flight took 45 minutes. Up, down before you drink a glass of water.
Flash forward to 2015: If you haven’t heard, for the first time in 50 years the President of the USA (at this time, Barack Obama) and the President of Cuba (Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother) shook hands at a summit in Panama and said something like, “We want to tear down this wall.” But the devil is in a few details: the US embargo, terror list, economic policy, etc.
The wall is a real one for the “average Cuban” living under Communist rule. Citizens have little access to goods of all sorts, like soap, clothes, furniture, even equipment to preserve vegetable seeds to plant future crops. At an organic farm, we saw beautiful healthy crops and chemical-free rabbit poop fertilizer, but each year’s seeds have to be ordered from other countries and only after permission from Castro’s government. Red tape reigns.
Soap. On the street one day, an elderly woman approached one of our tour companions. She’d spotted a plastic bag he carried full of soap bars to donate to a nursing home that we were scheduled to visit later that day. What could he do? He reached in the bag and handed her a bar of soap. Kindness rules. Then…ten more Cubans out of nowhere swarmed around our friend, begging for soap, too. That soap riot is burned in my memory…one of the saddest sights I witnessed in Cuba. Hotel maids take extra soap left by tourists and sell it on the black market. Doctors make more money moonlighting as taxi drivers than they make all day doing surgery. And the 1950 Chevy taxis are ready to break down at the next intersection.
The lighter side: This alligator-shaped island is beautifully green, dotted with palms and exotic flowers. Industrious Cubans run restaurants in their homes, making delicious, authentic Cuban food. In Havana, the seaside walkway called the Malecon, is where friends and lovers stroll at all hours. One young Cuban woman we met revealed that her boyfriend proposed to her there.
Fabulous music is played at every corner, in every bar. Cuban music is a combination of African and Spanish rhythms full of passion. One co-traveler, Sharalee, recounted her most favorite moment of the trip. She and Rene, another friend in our group “…took an afternoon walk down the shaded marble promenade that splits the two sides of the main boulevard in Havana. We came upon a group of several senior couples, dressed in their subtle finery, ballroom dancing to a live combo.
One couple stood out for their stately elegance as they danced to the sweet music. Slowly, other couples backed away, leaving these two alone; even in the spotlight, their focus remained serenely on each other and the beautiful rhythm of the dance as they moved around the circle.” ~ Sharalee
Traveling offers many gifts—one of the best is friendship. Our Cuban adventure bonded me with Sharalee and Rene so wonderfully that they were thrilled to serve as “first readers” of my forthcoming book: Undertow: A Personal Story of Seventeen Years in a Fundamentalist Cult. Cheers to them!
More updates on our trip to Cuba are in “the writing chute.” Remember to register your email in the “Subscribe to Updates” box at the top of this page to get them in your Inbox. See you next time!
